uIntern

As a high school student, have you ever wanted to land an internship at a local firm, but don't know where to go? Don't know who to approach? uIntern is here to bridge that gap for you!

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Inspiration

The inspiration for my application comes from an experience I had over winter vacation. Being an 11th grader (junior), I felt that its high time for me to start gaining some real world experience and maybe interning at a local tech/finance firm, as that's where my interest lies. After days of calling relatives, family friends and cold-messaging HR representatives from small businesses that I found on Google, I finally got a chance to work for a couple weeks. After the horrible, tiring experience I had, I realized this is an issue almost every teenager my age is facing, which inspired me to create a prototype that would solve this problem.

What it does

My application, uIntern, aims to bridge this gap between students and local businesses. Students can search through a list of firms in their area and can directly chat with them through the inbuilt chat feature within the app itself.

How we built it

The application was built using Kotlin and Firebase Database on Android Studio. I learnt Kotlin a while back through a Udemy course; the chat app for uIntern is inspired by the YouTube channel "Let's Build That App". Kudos to Brian Voong for making this project successful! link

Challenges we ran into

I tried implementing a search feature that would allow students to search by name/date/type, etc. My limited experience with programming, being a beginner programmer led to this being largely unsuccessful. I had to revert through a list of buttons that displayed options to choose from, which was not the original plan. Secondly, there is an issue in the chat feature wherein I am not able to differentiate between students and firms as exclusively as I should be able to, which is something I want to work on. I ran into a boatload of bugs and errors and had to constantly look at StackOverflow to sort them out. During project submission, due to a lack of storage space, only the APK was uploaded.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successful Chat app, clean splash screen animation, no errors upon execution! :)

What we learned

Gained a lot of Kotlin/Java knowledge, Learnt how to implement Firebase, gained more confidence with programming.

What's next for uIntern

Getting it onto Google Play Store, actively talking to firms to try and get it implemented, making the chat app more efficient, secure and sophisticated, launching uIntern 2.0.

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